Analyze why companies offer less choice

Internet startups are now countless, roughly divided into two, one is the more the better, to provide users with as many choices as possible, while the other is to provide users with carefully prepared choices. Art Sumo Company belongs to the latter, and the practice results are very good. In this article I will first explain why "offer less choice", and then based on this reason, I would describe several startups who chose the same approach and achieved good results as a case in point.

The less choice, the better the effect, why?

In the book The Paradox of Choice:why is pager, American psychologist Barry Schwartz believes that too much choice can cause anxiety to consumers, and that they don't feel "in power" because of the richness of their choices-- Before making a decision, they have to study all the options with difficulty.

Barry Schwartz also described his latest experience in buying jeans in his Ted speech. Schwartz called a shop assistant to help, the clerk not only did not ask the size of the Schwartz, anyway, first raised a series of questions: "You want to straight pants or straight cut?" Schwartz was frightened by the battle and was not satisfied with the jeans he had bought. So he decided to write a book to study the problem thoroughly. He concludes that while the jeans he buys are objectively better than the one he bought in the 1980s, he will be happier if he chooses less.

We assume that more choices will allow us to find exactly what we need, but more choices become a burden when we are not sure what we want.

Art Sumo

When I started art Sumo, I thought about offering fewer choices, more choices meant taking on more inventory, dealing with more artists, and creating higher risks.

We have implemented a "buy every day" strategy to provide customers with only one piece of goods a day. In my vision, people will always subscribe to a day to see the interesting works of art, if the fancy of a painting, it will produce a purchase impulse.

After the site was online, a number of gallery owners told us that the experience was closer to the gallery experience, and that most art enthusiasts would patiently admire the painting until they fell in love with one. After looking at a particular picture, they also think about whether it matches the home decoration. Very few people go to a gallery and open their mouths with a 20-30-inch-wide, white-framed, van-inspired piece of art--but there is such a website.

Grouper

Instead of providing users with a searchable database of users, such as a common dating site, the dating site grouper uses your Facebook data to arrange dates for you to match the highest level of sex.

In addition, in order to avoid the embarrassment of a one-to-one appointment, Grouper also asked for a date with two same-sex friends in the form of three to three. Can be three men to three women, three women to three women or three men to three men. Such a way can avoid the embarrassment of dating two people, and companions can play the role of wingman (the effective foil to help others to chat).

I particularly like this idea, which is not only natural, interesting, but also a pretty good business strategy: The database does not need a lot of users, the site can be run.

Jack Threads.

Jack Threads is a men's shopping community, and its founder Jason Ross feels that selling designer menswear on sale can work. But Jason didn't want to use too much inventory to test idea's viability, so he made a "buy every day" website that allowed users to buy only the items that appeared on the site every day. As goods and prices are very strong, a large number of users flocked.

The market was proven to exist, and after that, Jason went nonstop to meetings, got exposure on many blogs, and ended up with 350,000 of subscribers in a year. After more member users joined, Jason turned the site into a gilt-like flash-purchase site, which, while continuing to create impulse purchases, offered more choices to a large number of members.

How to achieve the scale?

From the above example, the "offer less choice" approach seems really good, but it is naturally facing the "scale" of the problem. People like "less choice", which also means fewer opportunities to sell and more hard money to earn.

So companies like Jack Threads, Woot and Groupon start out as a "daily purchase", control options, and when the number of users is large enough, they begin to expand and offer customers more choices. This seems to go against the idea of "offering less choice" at first, but it seems to me that these sites are actually very clever and have not harmed the essence of the original selection of goods. Groupon, for example, will now send a local specials to your mailbox and offer you other options on the day of the purchase. Groupon has been scaled to the day of the IPO.